To start the New Year on a toasty note, I received a bulky Fedex from a Terry
K. Qualey at an IP law firm. It appears that tey represent a company called
Unified Data Technologies, Ltd., holders of U.S. Patent s #5,684,985 and
#6,092,077, as well as, to quote the letter, "other applicationsa pending on
this technology that are currently confidential."
A couple more relevant excerpts:
"Implementations of the well-known [RDF] and [RSS] technologies, among other
uses, may be covered by one or more of the claims of UDTL's patents."
"UDTL is currently offering opportunities to either jointly develop software,
or to license the technology from UDTL."
Well, if they've sent this pleasantry to a developer of an open-source RDF
implementation, then they have probably sent it to others as well. Has anyone
else received this? The bulk of the package is copy of the patent texts. A
quick skim makes it quite look as if they are trolling: I don't see any but
the most tenuous connection to RDF. But I gether from my uninformed, anxious
reading on patent warfare that merit hardly matter, but rather the ability for
the patent holder to ruin true or perceived comeptitors with frivolous claims
that bear the dubious stamp of the USPTO.
Considering the goals for a distributed and multi-platform Semantic Web, this
letter seems to be an anarchist's grenade. What is there to be done about it?
O yeah. Happy New Year.
--
Uche Ogbuji Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc. http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
XML strategy, XML tools (http://4Suite.org), knowledge management